The 3 most common questions (and answers) we get about MTA

By: James Bance - Director, Global Inside Sales, Convertro

Over the last 4 years, I’ve been fortunate to work for 2 of the most well regarded multi-touch attribution (MTA) providers in the business. I’ve spent the majority of my time on the front lines, looking after prospect companies that were/are interested in learning more about the business impact and associated ROI of MTA platforms.

I’ve had hundreds of conversations with marketers uncovering their challenges around marketing measurement, and their (collective) desire to more efficiently manage and tune their media budgets. Here are some of the most popular questions we get, along with some answers that may help you if you’re considering making the jump to an MTA provider.

Question 1:

Which marketing channels does your platform give us the ability to measure and attribute? Can you measure offline media well?

When I hear this, it usually means the brand I’m speaking with has an omni-channel strategy that’s comprised of both addressable and non-addressable media and they’re not getting the clarity they need from traditional tools like Media Mix Modeling reports, or legacy media measurement tools.

First of all, every attribution provider is unique in how they address (or in some cases can not address) the cross-channel attribution challenge, but if the ultimate goal is to gain clarity into the effects of media across digital and offline mediums, then you’ll want to take a look at a “Unified Marketing Impact Platform” as reviewed in Forrester’s Wave Report on UMIA platforms.

Our Director of Product, Vish Oza, does a wonderful job of describing what one should look for in a “unified attribution” platform in this blog post, but can be summarized as follows:

Look for a provider using a single framework consisting of all marketing activities to measure their influence on the marketer’s goals, no matter what role in the org (CMO, Director, Analyst).

Measure the impact of all controlled and uncontrolled factors. They vary from product trends, media consumption habits, responses to messaging and competitor responses, to less obvious factors such as weather, economy, and seasonality. These things are dynamic and require a model that can monitor inputs as they evolve, so the model needs to be granular enough to measure those nuances.

It is important to find the right balance of automation and oversight where marketers can continuously monitor the execution of the plans and adjust them when the need arises in concert with the support/guidance of the attribution partner.

Question 2:

Who owns the data, and what can I export into our BI tools from your platform?

Data ownership should always remain with the brand. Look for providers that take this a step further and allow for a raw export of all data. We call it a Detailed Conversion Data (DCD) report. It’s an (Excel) export that gives users a row-by-row detailed output that documents every data point. The report gives a view into every conversion, marketing touchpoint activated, the value attributed to each touchpoint and can be sent to BI and visualization tools.

Question 3:

What are some of the near-term benefits realized even before I start receiving attributed results and insights from your model?

Every MTA provider is different, but when you onboard an advanced attribution platform you should expect to gain a return on your investment early in the engagement through the following:

Data Organization - often times marketing data is messy, contained in multiple silos, or not in a format that makes it easily usable in BI, or MTA platforms. We can help clean this up and get your data, and data strategy, in shape and ready for advanced attribution. While it’s somewhat of a labor intensive exercise, it’s invaluable for many organizations that need to codify their marketing data strategy. After all, anything worth doing, is worth doing right even if it means it’s going to take more effort.

Campaign Overlap - We recommend looking at tools where you can see channel overlap not only at the network level (in Display), but also down to the create/tactic level. Similarly in Search, you can see it at the keyword level.

Fraud Detection - The provider should use integrations (IAS is one example) that block bot traffic and non-brand safe placements across all inventory sources (pre-bid targeting) for both display and video.

Frequency Capping - Look for platforms that can frequency cap at the campaign level by day or by hour, or set frequency cap rules that can be applied to any number of campaigns or orders for a given advertiser